Issue of the week: Is Amazon’s Fire an iPad killer?

Amazon has brought out a tablet with a bare-bones design and a price tag that is half of Apple’s phenomenal iPad.

Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet arrives on the market as the anti-iPad, said Bianca Bosker in HuffingtonPost.com. With a price tag of $199, the “functional, but not fabulous,” Fire is less than half the price of Apple’s blockbuster. The rest of the tablet pack—Motorola, Samsung, and Sony—have all created devices that tried to best the iPad by “offering more bells and whistles” at the same high price, and they’ve barely nicked Apple’s dominance. Amazon has tried a different tack: a bare-bones design with a “wallet-friendly price tag.” Will it work?

The Fire has revolutionary potential, said Farhad Manjoo in Slate.com. Sure, it’s got some bugs: By iPad standards, it feels “chintzy and ungainly in your hands,” the navigation is poor, and its speakers are flat-out terrible. But I still “managed to do pretty much everything that I like to do on my iPad” on the Fire. And none of the new tablet’s problems “outweighs its one overriding advantage: It’s supercheap.” And it will get cheaper: Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, “is always slashing prices,” and sooner or later Apple will have to respond in kind.

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